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Hidden Figures (2016)

Rated PG

Levantine Films/Chernin Entertainment

That Hidden Figures rights a wrong by dramatizing the little-known history of brilliant African-American women, whose work proved instrumental in putting Americans into outer space, is enough to make this essential viewing. But I was surprised the film isn’t content to quit while it’s ahead.

Directed by Theodore Melfi, the film also inspires and entertains with its unabashed appreciation of science and intelligence, and with the heady competition between the U.S. and the Russians to reach the stars—the space race. I was surprised again when it took another lap around the screenplay to explore the gender inequality of the era.

Figures even finds time, briefly but pointedly, for romance, parenting issues, and marital concerns, giving particular space to black men as providers for, supporters and admirers of these intelligent women. I love movies that celebrate intelligence and imagination. I reflect that despite the film’s risk of biting off more than it can chew, it succeeds because it’s well-written (from strong source material), directed and acted.

At so young an age, Katherine’s (Lidya Jewett) fluency with numbers grants her stamina and opportunities against the liabilities of her era: being black and female. Katherine G. Johnson’s beautiful mind ultimately leads her to NASA where as a widowed mother (now marvelously portrayed by Taraji P. Henson) she joins other black women with dazzling intellect (they are called human computers by their NASA bosses). It’s refreshing that the film takes their intelligence as a given. We know they’re smart, everyone in the building knows they’re smart, their families and friends know it too.

These women and others like them work in the far reaches of the intellectual caste—rocket scientists, physicists, mathematicians and engineers—yet they live in a time of segregated restrooms and eager suspicions. Katherine’s colleagues and carpool mates include Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer, The Help) and Mary Jackson (singer Janelle Monaé). The commute to and from work allows the women time to let down their hair and air grievances to each other.

Dorothy is a mathematician and supervisor in all but title, while Mary is an aspiring engineer, capable enough, but held back by her gender and race. Katherine’s undeniable gifts lead her to become the first “colored” woman on the Space Task Group charged with sending an American astronaut into space.

At work, it’s all business all the time, with little room for error, having at least as much to do with NASA’s exacting standards as it does the discriminatory practices of the day. Just as I’m wondering how such smart, analytical folks could waste time with petty, irrational racism, Kevin Costner’s hardnosed task force leader Al Harrison grows furious that his ace computer, Katherine, has to waste time daily running across campus to use the “colors only” restroom instead of the one right down the hall.

The women’s work intensifies with news that Russians have successfully launched a satellite into space—and then a cosmonaut. America’s history of being first, best, a global leader is on the line. The nation is stirred by the possibilities of touching the stars. It’s an era of racial shame, sure, but also a unique one in which astronauts (Ohio’s own, John Glenn!) were superheroes. At some point, the united cause to be the first nation to blast off the planet brings temporary racial reprieve. I’m reminded of how a champion sports team or Olympic squad can unite a city, state, nation of racially diverse people for the common cause of victory. The outcome of the space race might be celebrated history, but not the legacy of these amazing women. Their place in NASA and American history is equally impressive. The film gets that on the record.

The cast is a balancing act of great performances. The lead actors are, of course, exceptional—Henson and Spencer build on solid careers; Monaé emerges as a talent to watch. And note Kirsten Dunst’s (The Virgin Suicides) subtle but impactful portrayal of a tired subjugated white women who has more in common with her subjugated black subordinates than she can say. The men shine as well. Costner’s stern, all-business egghead never breaks character, but we find his humanity in the growing respect he gains for Katherine’s intellect and determination. Jim Parsons (TV’s The Big Bang Theory) gives a shaded performance as a mathematician growing bitter in the shadow of Katherine’s gifts, torn by his respect and jealousy. Mahershala Ali, who’s having a good year with this film and the acclaimed film Moonlight (which also features Monaé), is wonderful as a stereotype-busting upstanding veteran who pulls Katherine back to a long-abandoned world of romance.

Hidden Figures is entertaining, informative, a bit suspenseful and important. It’s rare to see a “black” film not involving sports that so personifies the American spirit. It’s hard to see anyone not finding elements that hook them into this outstanding film.

 

 

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Summer Movie Series

Inside Out (2015)

Rated PG

insideout

Disney/Pixar

Known for taking children’s emotions seriously, Pixar’s latest film nevertheless surprised me with its complexity and daring. It’s not that Inside Out doesn’t have the Pixar touch: it’s funny and loaded with action and superb visuals. It’s also one of the studio’s most inventive, plot-wise, rivaling Monster Inc., Ratatouille and Up in that respect. But it carries the ambitions of Pixar’s more adult-leaning efforts, The Incredibles and Wall-E. It takes an adult to see what Pixar’s attempting here, but a child to feel it.

In the BloghouseBy now you’ve seen the previews, right? You’ve been introduced to Riley, the 11-year-old girl whose emotions are personified by cutely rendered and directly named creations: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Anger (Lewis Black) and Fear (Bill Hader). These beings stand around a console in the middle of Riley’s mind and take turns guiding her through her days. In an inventive system, the team captures Riley’s emotions in glowing spheres, which are organized according to importance and shipped off, via vacuum tubes and trains, to be stored until they are reused, forgotten or discarded.

The pixie Joy has big blue eyes and a sun-like aura. Anger, in his tweed pants and loosened necktie is forever moments away from literally blowing his top. Sadness, who in many ways becomes the heart of the film, mopes about with her asymmetrical haircut and turtleneck sweater. Disgust, who the film does the least with, has fabulous lashes, perfect hair and a high-maintenance disposition. The insect-like Fear is mostly over-the-top manic, but he does get some big laughs.

Like old pros Riley’s color-coded emotions know when each is up at bat. She needs some toughness to excel on the hockey ice, here comes Anger to juice her up. She needs her spirits lifted after a bad situation, there’s Joy. About Joy: she’s clearly the leader of the pack, whose abundance of, well, joy keeps Riley buoyed along rippling currents of adolescence. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, isn’t it? A child leading a joyous existence? But what happens when joy isn’t suitable as a coping mechanism? Realistically, can we be happy all the time, in every situation?

Riley’s life faces a seismic shift when her family relocates to the West Coast. New home, new school, new friends. Now the animated kids’ film begins to deepen as life’s realities reshape emotions and self-value.

I can think of a half-dozen ways this movie could have taken easier routes through this material, like the tried-and-true Pixar formula of one part kid mixed with one part adult mixed with one part critic-impressing subtext. Instead it relies on honest emotions and not half measures to pull us to its conclusion.

The psychological and neurological underpinnings of the film seem seriously considered. We’re dealing with short-time memories, long-term ones stored as keepsakes, and essential core memories that are critical to Riley’s fundamental outlook on life. There are long-standing islands harboring the girl’s personality: one formed from love of family, one formed for zany diversions, still another based around her love of hockey. (It’s brutal to see those islands crumble under trauma faced by Riley.) There’s long-forgotten wastelands of defunct memories (and discarded imaginary friends) and emotions that are haunting. Not to mention visits to towns that house Riley’s abstract thinking, dreams, imagination and fears. The team manufacturing her nightly dreams as if they were film productions is particularly inspired.

The plot involves the upheaval of those core memories as Joy and Sadness are accidently launched away from headquarters and must journey home before Riley’s life implodes from the lack of Joy and the internal conflict from the remaining emotions—at the very time in her life when she needs them at their best. The film gains power as we cut back and forth between the exciting mission inside Riley’s head and the blunt emotional consequences in her real world. It’s one thing to see the emotions muck up their roles and tumble through various caverns in their child’s mind; it’s another to see young Riley slip into depression and emotional confusion and anger she can’t articulate to her parents. With Joy away from headquarters, even Riley’s love of hockey and the self-esteem it built slips away in one heartbreaking scene.

At one point during the film, my daughter began to cry and I wondered if the material was too much for her. As I watched her, I realized she was right there fraught with Riley, and ultimately, like Riley, my daughter worked her way through her emotions. Somehow the film makes visually manifest abstract ideas of how we can laugh and cry through the same experience—and how each of those emotions are essential.

It’s not the greatest animated film ever made, but Pixar could have rested on its laurels and delivered a good, fun movie with this material. Instead, in pushing to make one of its most ambitious films yet, Pixar sinks the slap shot.

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More Summer Movie Reviews:

Terminator Genisys

Jurassic World

Tomorrowland

Mad Max: Fury Road

Avengers: Age of Ultron

 

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Summer Movie Series

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Rated R

madmax_fr

Warner Bros. Pictures

Mad Max: Fury Road is told almost entirely in terms of action. It’s an extended chase from Point A to Point B and then back. That director George Miller elevates this chase to visual, sonic and kinetic elegance proves that you can turn nearly any story into a great film if you know what you’re doing.

In the BloghouseHow many car chases have we witnessed in action films? At this point, what can be done to distinguish a good car chase from all others? I’d say distinctive style, which Miller has in spades, harkening all the way back to 1979’s Mad Max.

The character Max Rockantansky has been reimagined for a new generation. Tom Hardy is even less chatty than Mel Gibson’s iconic version, who had three films of his own. We meet this new Max as he’s eating a live lizard and repairing his supped up ’73 Ford Falcon “Interceptor,” a holdover from the original film. We know he’s lost his family because of the fleeting images that haunt him. And while he’s ostensibly the hero, the film’s about Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa (get used to names like that, the film’s loaded with them). Her haunted eyes, prosthetic left arm and branded neck tell us she’s endured things beyond belief. In a post-apocalyptic world we’ve known from the previous films, Furiosa lives in one corner, The Citadel, ruled by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) who uses women as chattel (for milk, pleasure and breeding), while hoarding a water supply from the dusty, dirty masses. He’s supported by his War Boys henchmen, also dusty and dirty but better fed and given vehicles.

Furiosa takes a stand and escapes with Joe’s five wives, two of whom are pregnant. Hiding the women within a tanker, Furiosa turns a supposed fuel run into an escape agenda to her homeland—and the chase is on. During the run she crosses paths with Max and Nux (Nicholas Hoult), one of Joe’s cancer-addled War Boys.

The rest is Miller magic. The post-apocalypse has never looked so bleak yet wonderful. Miller reminds us he’s a visionary. Masterful, whether he’s packing the frame with visual puns and throwaway imagery or dazzling with beautiful wide-angle vistas. One haunting scene shows humans lumbering on stilts across a dried-out, poisoned landscape like giraffes on a bombed-out Africa veldt. And the colors! They explode from flames and flair-gun tendrils and blowing sand and dust from cascading rocks. The chase takes us through canyons, across sinking fields, along bone-dry wastelands, past a grassy oasis and into impossible sand storms.

To say nothing of the people inhabiting this world: wiry and muscled, sun-blasted and chalked-up, mutated post-nuke hellions and soft-skinned beauties. The inhabitants are scarred with brandings and tumors and tattoos, and festooned with tribal paint, leather and furs.

Miller’s vision extends to the vehicles, which are basically characters themselves. We have motorcycles and tractor trailers, customized dune buggies and sedans and retrofitted trucks with cranes and scoops, and double-decker wagons. Machinery is fetishized with artifacts and spot welded into hybrid monstrosities, adorned with banners and long flexible poles that support swaying War Boys; even moving scaffolding support huge bass drums that set the pace, and a heavy-metal guitarist whose riffs spew dragon-fire.

Water, food and foliage may be scarce, but not gasoline. These big-wheeled vehicles boom and zoom through vast desert and salt flats with abandon, heedless of fuel or repair needs.

Forget over-the-top, this film is custom made to rev us up and beyond, around, underneath and through its chase-plot by any means necessary.

Any character development we get is through sorrowful gazes or crazed expressions or primal screams or knowing grunts; Miller’s a pro at this. Amid the chaos he knits in his themes: vengeance, solidarity and finally redemption. I remember again his skill at sketching dozens of characters—and vehicles—from corky traits, blunt visuals, and above all, action.

This movie totally succeeds in its agenda. It’s action-packed, visual astounding, simply plotted and completely contained. Every moment works.

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Summer Movie Series

Lucy (2014)

Rated R

lucy18-1

Canal+

Director Luc Besson (The Professional, La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element) has been off his game for some time now. Lucy is a step back to form, but he doesn’t quite get there. The film wants to have more depth than its screenplay allows. In addition to being an action film, a fight film, a philosophical and literal take on the evolution of man, quantum ideas of consciousness, the film wants to explore the end of human existence and what may lie beyond it. Right. But mostly it’s an action film.

In the BloghouseLucy (Scarlett Johansson, Her) is an American studying in Taiwan who hooks up with Mr. Wrong, who inadvertently pulls her into a synthetic drug ring. Forced to be a mule for an improbable narcotic that will either kill you deader than dead, or jumpstart your brain function beyond its known capabilities, Lucy—through a ruptured implant—gets the latter.

At first we know the drill: we’ve seen Johansson as the Black Widow in three Marvel movies now. She can dispatch roomfuls of armed men using martial arts and various weaponry. But once the drug improves her brain function exponentially, who needs weapons when you can control matter … then read minds … then sense emotion in its purest form … then visualize human souls … then affect space and time itself?

Morgan Freeman’s on hand as a renowned scientist whose theories on the mysteries and depths of the human mind are validated by Lucy’s existence. She seeks him out after reading his life’s work in mere minutes. Meanwhile, the leader of the drug ring Min-sik Choi (Oldboy, 2003) wants his product back—by any means necessary. There’s something to be said about a man who continues to pursuit a woman who has stopped bullets midflight and can reverse time itself. He’s pretty cocksure.

All of this can be fun, and if you’ve come to this for the action and fight scenes alone, you’ll get your fill. But in trying to be more than an action film, while not really taking its philosophical components full weight, the movie feels disjointed.

It’s Besson’s incredible La Femme Nikita crossed with 2011’s Limitless (which itself bites off more than it can chew) but isn’t as good as either of those films.

This film might have erred by casting Johansson, who certainly has acting chops and action-film bonafides. Unfortunately, because she brings the expectations of a hide-kicking, name-taking superhero, we’re denied what should have been a jolt from seeing a vulnerable stranger in a strange land transformed into an awesome instrument of destruction and resurrection.

If Besson is trying to speak something to the nature of evolution and violence in society, it gets lost in the clutter.

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Video review

Oldboy (2013)

Rated R

oldboy

Good Universe/Vertigo Entertainment

In Oldboy, Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin) slaughters a dozen men during a battle royal up and down a sparse warehouse corridor. This film too was slaughtered at box office. That director Spike Lee’s remake of the fantastic 2003 South Korean film bombed confuses me. He’s a gifted director, regardless of how you receive his politics or social activism, and the original is a movie so good even a mediocre director would have to go out of his/her way to ruin it. So how did this happen?

In the BloghouseI’m not sure, but don’t miss the opportunity to give this overlooked drama/thriller a chance now that it’s available on DVD. Be warned, though, that like the brutal, uncompromising original, its taboo subject matter revealed in its final act is not for all sensibilities.

Much of the original story remains intact, though relocated to an American city, of course. Beginning in the early 90s, we meet Doucett as a slimy, perverted drunken ad exec who misses his daughter’s third birthday party for sake of a do-or-die client meeting he quickly destroys through his piggish behavior. Doucett is the type of guy you suspect would have missed his daughter’s birthday regardless, and is quick to tie one on after a night of abject failure. We know the drill: vomit, urine, tears, a meek attempt at reconciliation. We’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such a slimeball who deserved everything happening to him.

After that intro, he awakens alone, locked in what appears to be a modest hotel room, hung over, confused. He will remain in this room for 20 years. As he round-robins through fear, anger, sadness, suicidal thoughts—and takeout dumplings—a television offers hints at the changing world outside: The Clinton years, the George W. years—including the Sept. 11 attacks and the second Iraq war—and into the Obama years. The TV also offers martial arts programs, which help him tune up his flabby physique; an exercise program, whose comely female host becomes a sexual surrogate; and most importantly, a true-crime show that details the rape and murder of his ex-wife, the frame-up that makes the missing Doucett the suspect, and the subsequent adoption of his daughter.

This is a terrific first act.

Just as he’s about to execute a years-in-the-making escape, he’s gassed and released, provided with an envelope of money, an iPhone and cool sunglasses. Doucett knows what needs to be done: find his daughter, create a long list of people he may have wrong and set off on a mission of revenge. By the way, years of studying martial arts on TV can be put to good use in the real world.

In his search, Doucett meets two key people. The first is a caring social worker and former drug addict (Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Godzilla) who reads the never-mailed letters Doucett wrote for his daughter while locked away and is moved by his plight. The second is the shadowy figure (Sharlto Copley, District 9) who is responsible for Doucett’s incarceration. This guy’s an effeminate, obscenely rich, seemingly all-knowing puppet master, who’s obviously demented. He makes Doucett an offer that makes up the second act of the film. Doucett has to discover who this man is and why he imprisoned him for 20 years. If he can accomplish this in 48 hours, the mystery man will confess to being the real culprit in his wife’s death (which he proves with a sickening video), pay Doucett millions of dollars, free his daughter (who the man maintains he has captured) and finally commit suicide.

The rest of the film plays out as a cat-and-mouse drama, love story and fight film leading to the big twist of the third act.

Brolin’s (Sin City: A Dame to Kill For) antihero is as grungy and nihilistic as actor Choi Min-shik’s version in the original; however the former’s character seems driven by obsession and trauma, while the latter’s performance has those plus a layer of insanity.

I think the film gets a lot right. It respects Chan-wook Park’s original, paying subtle homage to the infamous squid scene and the nasty tongue scene. And in a couple instances it one-ups its predecessor with the neat use of smartphone technology and a box cutter; it even sidesteps the hypnosis scenes I thought were the most contrived elements of the original film.

Park is nearly peerless in his cinematic framing, visual composition and shock imagery; his skills move his nasty genre effort to elegant heights at times. Lee doesn’t mimic Park, but relies on his own talents in tonal shifts, image repetition, his trademark “floating” double dolly shot and complex music cues to make scenes snap. While I don’t think Lee’s film captures character quirks and complexities as well as Park’s, the impact of Lee’s tweaked final act still shocks, disgusts, saddens.

So what’s going on? How did a movie this good fail so shockingly at the box office? We might factor in Lee’s controversial nature—did it bring perceived baggage to a genre film? (It certainly didn’t to his Inside Man.) Also, the original was a masterwork that has gained cult-film status; it’s always tricky to tamper with that kind of work. I recall casting changes, the film’s release date being shuffled around, and talk of studio interference of the final edit. If its failure was a matter of poor timing and promotion, it’ll find a good life on home video.

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